New York Yankees: Quietly hanging around in AL East race while injured stars heal

Yep, the Red Sox are off to a great start. So are the Oakland A's. As of Thursday morning they're the two best teams in the American League.

The Red Sox season started on a high note. They opened the season in the Bronx taking on their age-old rivals, the New York Yankees.

Boston took two of three in the Bronx and the Red Sox were off and running. The Yankees? They were dealing with a ton of injuries and had pieced together a make-shift roster of past-their-prime players and castoffs. Kevin Youkilis, Vernon Wells, and Travis Hafner? Not exactly "Murderers Row" correct?

Surely the fast starting Red Sox would easily put some distance between themselves and their pinstriped rivals.

The Yankees are in second place in the American League East. They've won three in a row and seven of their past 10. They're just one-and-a-half games out of first place, and with each passing day the Yankees are closer to getting key players such as Derek Jeter, Curtis Granderson and Mark Teixeira back to being healthy everyday contributors.

In other words, if they're pretty good now, they could easily be very good in a few weeks.

It might not be what Red Sox fans want, but it is what it is.

C.C. Sabathia always starts slow, he's a notoriously bad April pitcher, so his current numbers, which aren't by any means bad, bode very well for the oversized lefty.

Hiroki Kuroda is old and when he had to leave his first start of the season with an injured hand it was easy to assume that he might be headed for the type of season that 38-year-old starting pitchers are expected to have.

Instead Kuroda has steadied the ship. Last Sunday Night he came up huge against division rival Baltimore with a complete-game shutout of the Orioles.

All those patchwork offensive players have been pretty good.

Kevin Youkilis is hitting .327. Vernon Wells is hitting .295, and Travis Hafner is leading the team in nearly every offensive category hitting .342 with four home runs and an OPS of 1.142.

When the season started the Yankees were over a month from getting back most of their key players. Well that month is now over halfway finished. Derek Jeter's return may have been pushed back, but at some point the future Hall of Fame shortstop will be in the lineup.

Even if you're a pessimist who thinks that players such as Jeter and Curtis Granderson won't be as good as expected upon their return, it seems silly to expect then to not provide more offense than Eduardo Nunez and the Brennan Boesch/Ben Francisco platoon.

The Red Sox look are beginning to take on the aura of a legitimately good baseball team.

So are the Yankees.

Sorry Blue Jays fans, but the Jays weren't playing all that well before the team lost Jose Reyes for at least a month. The Yankees pitchers are old on the calendar, but Blue Jays pitchers R.A. Dickey and Mark Buehrle are the two pitchers who are really showing their age.

The Orioles look good, but not great, and Tampa has some of the elite pitching that people expected, but even less of what was thought to be a weak offense.

Could the American League East be headed for another season where the Red Sox and Yankees compete for the division title while the rest of the division looks on?

Don't look now, but there are plenty of signs that point to that being the eventual outcome.